Charles Dickens was there, milling outside the Victoria Mansion, using a cane and wearing a top hat.

In Victorian dress, Anna Halloran stood on the mansion’s porch pretending to sell “wonderous” patent medicine. “Ms. Laura Jones on High Street swears by it and bought three bottles last week,” Halloran said.

Palm and tarot card readings were given. The Shank Painters, a sea shanty band, filled the air with music.

“A Bizarre Victorian Bazaar: An Exhibition of Oddities and the Obscure” was held at the museum Saturday, kicking off the Halloween season. The goal was not only to bring in the public to explore the mansion, a National Historic Landmark built in 1860, but to learn about customs of the Victorian era, some of them a bit spooky.

“We want to make sure what we’re doing has an educational bent to it,” said Stacia Hanscom, director of education and public programs at the mansion.

To do that, the mansion pulled together different things “that Victorians believed, or did, that we today think a little bizarre,” she said.

Like the mummy unwrapping, for example.

“Victorians were fascinated by Egypt at the time. They would buy mummies. They’d bring them back to England and have either an exhibition, or even a home party and unwrap the mummy. Seriously,” she said.

When the mummies were unwrapped some of the remains – the hair and skin – were intact because the bodies were preserved, Hanscom said. The Victorians were curious but didn’t much care that it was once a living human being, she added.

On Saturday, the unwrapping party was staged with a plastic skeleton wrapped in crepe paper.

There were demonstrations and history lessons. Tom Kelleher, a historian at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, talked about phrenology, a belief in the 1700s that one could determine a person’s intelligence, strengths, weaknesses and personality traits by feeling the contours of their skull.

Sarah Coughlin, of Gorham, wearing Victorian garb, gave palm readings, including to visitor Jessie Horn.

The shape of a hand says a lot about people, Coughlin said. Horn’s fingers are short, suggesting she “is very good at working with your hands,” creating art or building, Coughlin said.

The top line, “the heart line,” is linear. “It means that she uses her head, she’s a very rational person,” Coughlin said. A curved heart line can indicate an individual has an emotional personality.

The reading also suggests that Horn is a rational person and “you have a hard time doing the job that you don’t love,” Coughlin said. Horn agreed.

Upstairs in the carriage house, Inge Graham displayed her collection of oddities. Graham owns Briar & Bone, a shop in Biddeford.

“We sell gifts for people with odd taste,” Graham said with a laugh. On display was a re-created cabinet of curiosities, another custom of the Victorian era. Before photography was invented, “if you wanted to learn about things you had to collect things, find these interesting things.”

Possessing a cabinet of curiosities “was totally a thing,” Graham said. “Kings and monarchs would collect all this knowledge. This is how they would learn about the world.”

Among her merchandise were fun items, including a black umbrella that reveals skulls when wet. Another was a skeleton puzzle made from old, educational prints and items decorated with vintage plants. “Victorians were obsessed with natural science,” Graham said.

Another item was a praxinoscope, a reproduction of an animation device invented in 1877. It has a strip of pictures around a spinning cylinder with slanted mirrors. When it spins, characters seem to move, dancing and removing their heads before passing them to the next character. The praxinoscope is “the great-granddaddy of modern cinema,” she said.

Outside the mansion, Savannah Irish read tarot cards. Pat Gazzelloni, of Scarborough, was eager for a reading.

Wearing lipstick and a dark, lacy dress, Irish asked Gazzelloni to take a card and flip it over. It was “The Page of Wands” card.

Two more cards were flipped over. Looking at the cards, Irish said she saw new beginnings. “We have inverted eight of cups” that suggests a void, of being dissatisfied. “It’s also saying you’re trying to find something,” Irish said, adding it was a positive reading.

Before she met with the tarot reader, Gazzelloni was all smiles. “I love this event. This is amazing,” she said.

With rain forecast Saturday, a performance by the Portland Ballet’s “Tales by Poe” could not be held, Hanscom said.

But the rain turned out to be mostly a drizzle, and outside events were held under tents. A few things had to be moved inside, Hanscom said, but the event went well. “It was sold out.”

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